Ofer Cassif
Ofer CassifYonatan Sindel/Flash90

MK Ofer Cassif (Joint List) visited administrative detainee Khalil Awawdeh, who is hospitalized at Assaf Harofeh Hospital after starting a hunger strike, Channel 13 News reported on Monday.

Awawdeh has been on a hunger strike since the start of July to protest his detention. He was admitted to the hospital on August 11.

Awawdeh’s name made headlines when the Islamic Jihad demanded his release as part of the conditions for the ceasefire that ended the IDF’s Operation Breaking Dawn.

While the Islamic Jihad claimed that Israel agreed to release both Awawdeh and Bassam Al-Saadi, the group’s leader in Judea and Samaria who was arrested before the start of the operation, Israeli leaders have denied the claim.

"I am here with Khalil Awawdeh, who has been on hunger strike for a very long time, in a just protest of his kidnapping," Cassif said in a video from the hospital. "There is no such thing as administrative detention. It's a washed-up phrase for kidnapping - when you take a person without guilt, without a case against him, without prosecution and essentially bury him, heaven forbid, in a prison, without a trial, without anything. Do you want to say something to your friends?"

The prisoner then said, "I thank all the people. I thank all the supporters. I thank our brother - the MK who came to visit; I thank everyone who expresses and provides support and backing in the face of the injustices suffered by this mighty nation."

Cassif, a Hebrew University professor who is the sole Jewish representative in the Hadash faction of the Joint List, has repeatedly drawn criticism for his anti-Israel statements, including comparisons of Israeli leaders and even the State of Israel to the Nazi party and Nazi-era Germany.

Cassif once shared a Facebook post calling Ayelet Shaked, who at the time was serving as Justice Minister, a “neo-Nazi scum”.

In 2017, he was recorded during a class comparing the State of Israel to Nazi Germany, warning that Israel was “on a slippery slope” to fascism.

Last December, Cassif said that Israel should not be compared to an apartheid state because, he claimed, it is “worse than apartheid”.

Before the election in April of 2019, the Central Elections Committee decided to disqualify Cassif from running, but the Supreme Court overturned that decision.